A trademark of the sci-fi genre is dark covers. I think this developed for obvious reasons. First among this is that a lot of sci-fi has traditionally been set in outer space, and outer space is a physically dark place. Also, dark colors are associated with fear, a dystopian world, danger, and thriller elements. Seeing a dark cover helps buyers instantly identify a book as sci-fi. Same standard applies to a few other genres, such as technothrillers.

When I wrote The Die, which is the first book in this series, I had to provide my publisher with a memo that laid out my input and druthers for the cover design.

At that point, I already knew that while I considered the book to be speculate fiction, most people (including my publisher) would be inclined to lump it in with sci-fi. In addition, they would call it dystopian fiction, even though it is arguably better described as utopian fiction. There wasn’t much I could do escape these genre traps. Except perhaps with respect to the cover design.

With that in mind, I asked my publisher to make sure the cover was not dark. I explained that, to distinguish it as metaphysical/visionary fiction rather than sci-fi, its cover needed to be light. All my suggestions stressed light, light, light!

Then I sat back and waited for my cover choices.

In fact, I received some dark cover designs. Maybe the designer thought I’d have a change of heart when I saw them. Sorry, not happening. I rejected the dark ones and chose one of the light ones, To this day, I love that cover!

Fast forward to the publication of its sequel, The Lie. This time the designer didn’t bother to show me any dark covers, and instead produced all light ones. It wasn’t hard to choose one. It’s a winner.

Look at this screen grab from a Book Sirens blast for their technothrillers.

Amazing how The Lie stands out! Everything else is dark, dark, dark, and then you have one light shining in the darkness. (Though “beasts” does stand out.)

I had to smile when I saw this spread because it confirms how stereotypical covers are when authors follow a genre code. It also shows how your book can stand out when you refuse to follow that code. Personally, I’d much rather stand out.

It astounds me how many authors are willing to be guided by the constraints of their particular genre. I’m sure many sci-fi books do well with dark covers. That’s fine; no argument there. But 90+% of them? I don’t understand why authors feel compelled to conform.

To push the point, I asked ChatGPT to design three covers for an imagined science fiction thriller. To be clear, I would never ever, ever, ever, use an AI cover. I just did this experiment to see what ChatGPT would pull out of the zeitgeist. And here you have the result:

Pretty dark, huh?

I should reiterate that I have nothing against dark covers for a sci-fi or thriller book, or for that matter, for any other book. Black is a powerful design element. My objection is the formulaic expectation that readers should be able to judge a book’s genre based on its dark cover.

Neither of these authors was wrong. Beach reads mean different things to different people, and our conception of what constitutes a beach read has evolved over time.

The concept can be traced to the late nineteenth century, when the rise of a middle class who could afford to enjoy summer vacations led to the popularity of what was known as “summer reads.” The term beach reads wasn’t coined until more than a century later, in 1990, when the publishing industry grabbed onto it as a marketing strategy. While beach reads weren’t directly inspired by the emergence of self-publishing and aren’t considered a genre, their success coincided with efforts to distinguish subcategories of books within an exploding marketplace.

So what exactly is a beach read, and should you aspire to write one?

The obvious literal meaning is a book to be read at the beach. Duh! Of course not everybody has access to a beach, so the concept can be taken to mean any book that allows readers to kick back, relax, and escape. Though not tied to a genre, beach reads were traditionally associated with romances and cozy mysteries. In other words, we’re talking about a book that is neither stressful nor particularly thought-provoking—one you wouldn’t want to read twice and therefore could leave behind at the beach (or pool or mountain cabin or airport). These days, you might just delete it from your e-reader’s library.

More recently, the marketing of beach reads has expanded to include a wider range of genres, such as thrillers, memoirs, and nonfiction. You might wonder why some books are sold as beach reads if just about any book could be considered one. That’s a fair question. I think it comes down to the added value we continue to place on books whose primary purpose is to provide a means of escape. And we do this even while describing many such books as fluffy, frivolous, or otherwise unsubstantial.

When I look around during this current cultural moment, I see a strong inclination among people to escape. For one person that might mean turning off the news and watching sports. For another it might mean spending time in nature, practicing yoga, or . . . sitting down with a book that allows them to forget about the state of the world.

All of that is understandable. No one would argue that the world isn’t stress-inducing or that we don’t need to decompress and engage in some self-care. If anything, we should probably feel less guilty when we do find and enjoy moments of escape.

Personally, this marketing trend doesn’t resonate strongly with me. That’s because, as much as I value self-care, I feel a responsibility to bring readers’ attention to the pressing issues of our time and to inspire them to think more deeply, learn something new, and balance their need for escape with a need to engage and to contribute to the world we live in. I do this through social impact fiction, which allows me to tell a serious story while also entertaining readers. You could say I want my fiction to pair escapism with engage-ism.

Does this element of engage-ism preclude my books from being sold as beach reads? Considering the current definition, perhaps not. However, when someone recently mentioned their potential as beach reads, I found myself cringing.

I immediately realized that despite evolving definitions, beach reads still carry a stigma. It was a real ouch moment. Throwaway, expendable, less than, lacking gravitas were some of the judgments that came to mind.

Yes, I always welcome the prospect of more sales, but my books don’t deserve to become Cinderella reads after Labor Day. Nor would it help to say they’re “winter reads” or “snow reads.” My books belong to all seasons.

As a writer who is either aspiring to write a beach read or considering marketing a book as one (because I think writers tend to come to beach reads after the fact), here are some questions you might ask yourself:

• Do I feel any stigma associated with beach reads?

• What expectation does labeling my book—whether fiction or nonfiction—a beach read set for readers?

• Does that expectation align with what the book delivers?

• Do I wish my book to be viewed or used as an escape?

• Is the stigma of a beach read (if I feel it), something I need to avoid or is it not a big deal?

• Am I giving up anything by labeling my book a beach read?

Ultimately, tagging a book as a beach read is a marketing decision. But it is an especially consequential marketing decision because it has the potential not only to impact sales but also to reflect on the perceived quality of your book.

Credit: WikiImages/Pixabay

When I read the Kirkus review of my latest book, The Lie, my eyes went to the phrase “A quietly suspenseful dystopian novel. . .” The book is more utopian than dystopian, but other than that, I was thrilled. I thought, They got it! They understood what I’m trying to do!

I did have a moment of doubt, thinking perhaps I was too eager to see the best and this was a backhanded compliment and they were really saying the book drags. But this sentence cleared that up: “Berman draws out revelations for maximum theatrical delivery and builds an atmosphere of steady accumulating tension.”

I asked my publisher if we could put “quietly suspenseful” on the front cover of the book so my intentions would be crystal clear to readers. And there it sits. Every time I look at it, I smile.

But—perhaps no surprise—not everybody gets it. A reviewer who read an advanced copy recently left a long and detailed review that said wonderful things. But he gave the book only 4 stars. To be clear, I’m not someone who complains about 4 stars. But I was curious why.

Here’s what he said: “The main reason it stops just short of a full five stars is that the pacing can feel slightly disjointed as it balances so many different narrative threads at once. . . . Certain high-stakes moments are paused for internal reflection just as the suspense reaches a peak. Additionally, while the metaphysical layer adds wonderful complexity, readers looking for a purely fast-paced, straight-ahead techno-thriller might find those reflective passages slowing down the central rescue mission.”

Much as I appreciate the review, I had to shake my head. Because he didn’t get it.

We live in the world that is diced up into genres, and these genres come with rules and expectations. Not only is it virtually impossible to avoid these expectations in the literary marketplace, but genres subtly and not so subtly train readers to narrow what they want to read. You end up with, for example, “readers looking for a purely fast-paced, straight-ahead techno-thriller.”

I’m not saying it’s wrong to look for a book with a narrow focus. But what is problematic is when that reader then judges a book because it delivers something more than or different from their narrow focus.

On the other end of the equation, this hits the writer too. If your book is a romance, it has to have a happy ending. If your book is a thriller, it needs to live up to that; it has to be “loudly” suspenseful. “Quietly” suspenseful is essentially a fail.

As a writer, I bristle at this because it is telling me what I can and cannot do if I want my book to have a chance “out there.” Truth be told, I’m neither a reader nor a writer of thrillers. I use the element of suspense to tell a good story, but I’m more interested in character, in moral dilemma, in philosophy, in message. Those are what drive my writing, and they are all quiet elements. If you want to put a formula to it, you could say my book is three parts quiet and one part suspense. Yet I have little to no control over how the marketplace pigeonholes my book(s).

I’m writing about this because I want to name the problem and I want to push back against the constraints. I’d like to believe I’m not the only one who values quiet suspense, or for that matter, appreciates a good oxymoron.

I want to read books that are unique creations of the author rather than written to genre specifications. How about a near-future historical novel? Or historical dystopian fiction? Maybe a tearjerker happily-ever-after romance? I’m being silly, but can we please push the boundaries with our books?

And . . . The Lie is available for preorder wherever you buy your books.

Well, an exciting, enticing conversation, that’s what could happen! And that’s exactly what did happen when Nancy (NJ) Mastro, Joan Fernandez, Lisa Groen, and I joined forces recently.

Each of us was drawn to write about a woman that history nearly overlooked. For me, that was Angelica Kauffman, whose story I told in The Vow. History forgot about Angelica for about one hundred years, until she resurfaced in the 1990s.

One of my favorite moments in our conversation occurs when we discover that a character in The Vow also features in Nancy’s Solitary Walker. This is all the more amazing because he is not a well-remembered historical personage. (If you’re curious who that is, you’ll have to watch the video to find out …)

I’m really happy to share this conversation with you now on Substack at:
The Art of Independence.

And, we enjoyed doing this so much that we decided to follow it up with a (free) live Q&A on July 23rd. (If you can’t make that date, register anyway and we’ll send you a recording.) Oh, and registering will also enter you in our 𝒃𝒐𝒐𝒌 𝒈𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒂𝒘𝒂𝒚!

So I did the usual. But it didn’t work. I tried a couple of other maneuvers, and they didn’t work either. Pretty soon I was out of options. So I thought, Time to call Microsoft.

You probably know where I’m going with this. In fact, I hadn’t called Microsoft in some time. I was about to find out how different things are now.

To back up for a minute… when the monitor was young and I didn’t know how to fix it when it disconnected, I always called Microsoft support. (Before that, I went to the local Microsoft store—which of course hasn’t been there for years—and brought my computer and had them look at it.)

Even after my computer was out of warranty, I could call online support for issues related to their updates. They would ask a few questions, and then they would take remote control of the computer and quickly solve whatever was wrong.

This week, faced with a problem I couldn’t solve, my first thought was that I needed a human. So I called. And I waited. And waited. And waited. For the life of me, I could not reach a human.

After three of four hours, I decided to see if I could reach a sales person instead. And I did! In the entire episode, which lasted about eight hours, she was the only human I talk to. To be clear, most of the time we were only texting. Her name was Lexi, and it occurred to me after a while that maybe she wasn’t human. (Does Lexi sound like a bot?) But then she suggested calling me and trying to connect me with a tech person.

So she called. It took her a very long time to reach a tech person, but eventually she got through. I was on the line with the tech person for five seconds before the call dropped. So I went back to texting with Lexi. She called me again and tried to contact another tech person. As soon as she did, that call dropped. At that point, she said she was sorry and she couldn’t help me.

Lexi suggested I continue to try calling on my own. But I quickly found that when I called the Microsoft number, it immediately disconnected me because I had made “too many attempts in 24 hours.”

That was the freakout moment: I’m living in a world where THERE IS NO HUMAN TO HELP!

Since the system that supposed to provide humans had failed me, I decided to try ChatGPT. I mean, what else to do?

And honestly, talking to ChatGPT was more of a “human” experience than what I’d just been through. Chat bumbled along for a while—not making any major errors, but not solving the problem either. At least there was dialogue. At least there was attention to the problem.

Eventually I came up with the idea of reversing one of the updates. Chat agreed that was worth a try (though it hadn’t thought to suggest it). I did that, and OMG, it worked!

I had lost the better part of a day’s work. But why am I taking the time to write about this? Because as frustrating as it was, it was also illuminating. This isn’t news, but it was a firsthand experience of the absolute trash that online technical support has become. Nothing against the individual humans working there, but the entire system is so atrociously bad that as far as I’m concerned, those humans don’t get any credit.

AI is actually doing a better job—and this coming from someone who rants and raves about how AI is leading us down the wrong path.

For AI not to lead us down the wrong path, we humans had better create and preserve and maintain a better path. Otherwise AI will win by default.

I did a little bit of follow-up afterwards because I realized my monitor does have signs of aging, even if that wasn’t the cause of the decoupling incident. In the process, I chatted with a human sales person at HP. There was never an option to speak with them by phone. It’s easy to see how it’s just a matter of time before they will all be replaced by AI.

It wasn’t a fun day. I came away with a deeper realization of how AI is already running our world. And the scariest part? Much of the time we don’t even realize it.

Photo: kalhh/Pixabay

She was my great-aunt. I don’t think I look much like her, but my mother did—same dark eyes and wavy black hair.

Earlier this month, the lecture theater at the Eye Clinic of the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf was renamed in her memory. If I lived closer, I would have gone for the ceremony. But I didn’t. Instead I’m telling you a little bit about her.

Emma was born in Berlin in 1883. Against all odds in a male-dominated medical profession, she completed her medical studies and obtained a doctorate. Her dissertation refuted the notion that iris color changes in early infancy are a sign of degeneration (as promoted by eugenicists at the time) and instead demonstrated the influence of malnutrition.

She set up a practice in Hamburg. In 1926, she was the only woman among the thirty-seven ophthalmologists practicing in the city. She was also a promising scientist, working at the Eppendorf Eye Clinic. Her research on dark adaptation, the glial system of the intracranial optic nerve, and neuroglia staining was published in renowned journals of the time.

All this came to an end in 1933.

First her registration with the health insurance fund was revoked and then, like all Jewish doctors, she lost her medical license. Her brothers were able to flee Germany, but she stayed.

I remember my mother telling me that when the family tried to persuade Emma to leave, she said she could not imagine things would get much worse, that eventually sanity would be restored. She was unwilling to walk away from her work—which she loved, and to which she had dedicated her life—fearing it would be too hard to start over elsewhere. So she stayed.

She had another reason to stay: She was caring for her mother, Blanca, for whom travel would have been difficult. Emma stayed by her side until he mother died in 1939 at age eighty-seven—a decision that ultimately sealed her own fate.

For the next several years, she served as a nurse, attempting as best she could to provide medical care to the Jews who had remained and who were increasingly being forced into hard labor. The Gestapo made medical staff in the Third Reich decide on the transportability of Jews: If staff deferred someone on medical grounds, that could temporarily save their life but meant another person would be deported. A similar dilemma arose in the case of suicide attempts: Survivors were medically cared for, only to face deportation once recovered. Thus medical staff found themselves in constant conflict between medical ethics and a reality in which help often meant nothing more than a delay of the inevitable.

In 1942, Emma received a deportation order to Theresienstadt. There she ran an eye clinic, and even under inhuman conditions, tried to do everything she could for her patients with eye conditions.

On October 19, 1944, she was deported along with 1,500 other people to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Emma’s life ended at the age of sixty-one. Officially she was listed as “missing.”

I decided to post that Substack on my personal Facebook page. Because I know Facebook is allergic to links, I copied the full text into the post. I know that’s a lot words, but it was the only way to avoid the link.

More than one person commented that they don’t normally read long Facebook posts anymore. One said she only read mine because she figured I’m someone who wouldn’t use AI.

Basically, what’s happening is that people are associating long posts with AI. That hadn’t occurred to me before, though maybe it should have. But now that I think about it, I have been seeing tons of long AI-generated social media posts. So I guess, more specifically, what didn’t occur to me was how that use of AI might be affecting reading choices.

Let’s consider the implications.

On the positive side, I appreciate the possibility that people might refuse to read AI. Nothing would stop AI-generated writing in its tracks faster than people ignoring it. Of course, that hasn’t happened to any noticeable extent yet.

Case in point, I just saw a writer’s post discussing some experiment she had done using AI to revise her previously published human-written book. But I got one sentence into her post—which was long—and saw that it was written by AI. So I stopped reading. But many people were reading and commenting, so presumably it didn’t bother them (if they even noticed the AI).

On the other hand, it’s scary to think people might not read a long post I write simply because they assume it’s AI. Because AI is so pervasive, they don’t stop to ask, “Is it AI or not AI?” They just see long and turn away.

This means if you have something substantial to say, and you don’t want people to pass over it, you’re left with no leeway to elaborate. You’re limited to what’s essentially a tweet. Or you have to stay within designated social media zones (e.g., Substack) where people still tolerate full exposition.

We’re already living in a world where nuance is lacking, where information about serious subjects is reduced to sound bites and people snap at each other with one-liners. To my mind, we need fuller, deeper communication, not greater brevity.

It’s ironic that AI is so long-winded. Have you noticed how long, for example, a ChatGPT answer to a simple question is? I suppose if it doesn’t take longer to write a 1000-word answer than a 100-word answer, that makes sense. Whoever trained chatbots must have figured humans would be impressed by wordiness. Even if it forces us to skim.

When I said to AI or not to AI, I was being somewhat facetious. The answer is obvious: We don’t want to be AI. But Shakespeare’s was an existential question, and AI is an existential question of at least that magnitude for us now.

But then I saw the text accompanying the photo. AI of the most egregious kind.

Take this sentence for example, “[reading Gilead] changed him in ways that rippled through every decision he would ever make in the White House.”

Seriously? If a human ever wrote that, they would have an editor to hold them accountable. We hope.

So I did what I tend to do, which was leave a comment. It said, in effect, “Why use an AI version of something that has truth to it? There are alternatives, such as find a human-written account or write one yourself.”

The poster and others lashed back with “Can’t you just enjoy it and love it for the value it brings?”

In other words, who cares if it was written by AI?

Well, I care. And I have ever since AI asserted itself in its current form. More than a year ago, for example, an author I know reposted AI material on her socials, and I questioned it. In that case, I wasn’t sure she realized it was AI. Turned out she knew, and she was so offended that she blocked me. No exaggeration: She blocked me in outrage over my query about her AI post.

But back to AI Obama. I took the extra seconds to check where that post originated. Turns out it was from a FB page with entirely AI generated content, with similar types of stories featuring Jared Kushner, Princess Diana, and Bill Clinton, to name a few.

Then I looked at the page’s ownership history and found it listed as سكرة للخيوط والمستلزمات

Google translates that as “Yarn and Threads.” The owner has a shell LinkedIn account with links to Pakistan and Jordan. Of course, nothing nefarious about Arabic, but I have to ask: Why might this (non?)human be spending time putting out this content?

The more I think about all this, the more I wonder why we are choosing to normalize AI. Maybe it’s just easier to use AI, so we use it. Everybody’s doing it, so we do it too. It could be laziness, but I think it’s more than that. As we normalize AI, we lose our sensitivity to the difference. It becomes the new normal.

Take that sentence I quoted. Why wouldn’t someone reading it—especially a writer—stop and go WTF?! How can they see it as something to enjoy? Why don’t they bother to check the source?

These questions may sound rhetorical but they’re not. I really would like to know.

So here are some more questions. Because I think if we’re going to have any chance of swinging this tide, we’ll all need to consider these:

• Do you ever post AI-generated text on social media? If so, what is your thought process?

• When you see an AI-generated post, do you keep reading? Does it bother you at all?

• When you see an AI-generated post, do you say anything in response?

This is not to say there are no uses for AI. I regularly use it for research. And I’ve used AI images for Substack illustrations. (Maybe one of these days I’ll write about AI and art….) But I draw the line at writing—which, whether it is in a book or a post, is my human expression and message.

Recently, I obtained a human-authored seal for the copyright page of my forthcoming novel, The Lie. I realize it is less than 100% meaningful, because nobody’s checking the book to see if it was really written by a human. But it’s the least I could do for a story that centers on the perils of AI.

Now I’m thinking books aren’t enough; perhaps I should put a human-authored sign on my social media as a sign of my commitment not to post AI-generated writing. I’ll have to figure out how to put it on there, but it’s not a bad idea. Join me?

My first piece was Genres as Crushers of Creativity. I had just published The Die and was beginning to grapple with how to talk about a book that defies genres. It threw me when people thought it was science fiction but then complained when it didn’t live up to their criteria for science fiction.

One reviewer of crime thrillers was not impressed. That was understandable, though I found her comment that it “tries a little too hard with the moral philosophy and not quite enough with the tech” a bit disingenuous. I mean, what if she wrote a crime thriller and I criticized it for not having enough romance?

Over time, I did learn ways to navigate the cross-genre waters. It didn’t hurt to be the International Book Awards winner for cross-genre fiction. One can actually be rewarded for writing cross-genre books—imagine that!

Since then, I’ve published two more books. While neither spans genres the same way The Die does, I now have a diversity of genre across all three books. When someone asks what I write, I say, “Well, historical fiction, speculative fiction, metaphysical fiction, political fiction, short stories, tech thrillers…” I could keep going, but by then they’ve gotten the point.

I’ve created some ways to play with this. For example, when I do a meet-and-greet at a bookstore and someone approaches the table, I ask, “Are you a past person, a future person, or a present person?” Depending on what they say, I direct them toward my historical fiction (The Vow), near-future speculative fiction (The Die), or political fiction short stories (Shot). In fact, I’ve gotten so I can guess someone’s preference when they’re within ten feet of the table.

My next book, The Lie, comes out this summer. Since it’s a sequel to The Die, I’m preparing myself to negotiate that cross-genre terrain again.

Recently I got a little help from Kirkus Reviews, which used the phrase “quietly suspenseful.” Now, you might take that as a criticism, as insufficiently suspenseful. But I love it! Its paradox captures the essence of what cross-genre means; it tells you everything you need to know about a book that is both metaphysical fiction (quiet) and a tech thriller (suspenseful).

One more thing.

I haven’t gotten to the reason I wanted to write this post—my cross-genre life as expressed through Substack. It is generally considered smart to focus a Substack on one topic so you can grow your audience around it. Clearly I’m not doing that. I write about books and publishing, about being a writer, about artificial intelligence, about metaphysics, about politics, about my family’s history, about art and creativity. I’ve also posted videos. Basically whatever’s on my mind.

That’s probably a liability. For example, someone sees a post on historical fiction and signs up; then they see a post about current politics and quickly unsubscribe. But the truth is, I’m not about to narrow my focus, though there are plenty of topics you won’t see me write about, such as fine wines or racing cars or cats. Still, if you’re expecting one thing from me, I am unlikely to deliver.

I’m curious, though: Do you prefer Substacks with or without a narrow topic? How do you relate to cross-genre books in general? Is there any way in which you are living a cross-genre life?

In the summer of 2024, I realized the story of The Die was not over—that is, not its parallel story in our real-life world, and so not what was happening in my characters’ near-future world either.

And thus The Lie was born.

Over an intense year of writing, the story unfolded. For now, I’m sharing the cover. Whether or not you’ve read The Die (yet), I hope you’re intrigued…

The pub date is August 4, 2026. Available now for preorder wherever books are sold!

How did we get here?

First, what I am NOT doing is weighing in, one way or the other, on the guilt of Eric Swalwell. (And I don’t want comments about that either, because it’s my not my topic.) This is more about straight math.

A few days ago, for the first time, one Democrat (Swalwell) stood apart from the rest based on his apparent capacity to beat the Republican candidates. Prior to that, among the crowded field of Dems, the vote was too split. Most of those running have been unable to even reach 10%. None has a wide enough base of support and/or sufficient name recognition.

There’s been a lot of talk about narrowing the field so Republicans can’t come out of the primary with the two top candidates. But that has proven easier said than done. And days after it WAS done, some powers that be made sure to wipe it out.

One factor to consider now is that 25% of voters are undecided. While you might wish to assume their votes will simply peel off for whoever emerges as the top Democrat, that’s not a safe assumption. It’s just as likely, given the crowded field, that those folks don’t vote at all. Especially since we’re talking about a primary, where turnout is typically around 20% if eligible voters to begin with.

As of now, Swalwell is still in the race. However, he’s no longer an effective front runner, regardless of whether the accusations turn out to be true or false. This means none of the four top Democrats currently has the backing to beat the two Republicans: Porter, Bacerra, Steyer, and (unless he drops out) Swalwell. To be clear, even if he does drop out, none of the other three appears poised to beat the Republicans.

Maybe you’re in an anti-Democrat mood, thinking, “A Republican governor would serve them right.” Let’s be clear. We’re looking at Trump-endorsed Hilton (you don’t want to see the autocorrect I triggered by accidentally reversing the 3rd and 4th letters of his name). I could write an entire post on what life under his leadership would be like, but I’ll let you start to fill in the blanks:
1….
2….
3….
4….
One thing is for sure, a Republican California is a Trump wet dream. With Steve Bannon, Roger Stone, etc. cheering from the wings.

Today is April 12. Ballots mail out to voters on May 4. That’s less than a month from now. We are talking about mere weeks to turn this around. Or days.

So my question is What will you do to help save a Democratic California?

Again, not entertaining commentary about Eric Swalwell; we have plenty of other spaces for that. What I would like to know is how you think we can fix this in the very short time we’ve got left.

It’s been a fascinating experience and I’ve learned a lot. First there’s all the technical stuff--like editing in Canva and adding subtitles and thumbnails. But it’s also got me thinking about media formats. Considering how finicky our attention spans are these days, a short (defined as 3 minutes or less) can attract viewers in a way that a longer video or podcast won’t. At the same time, one needs more than 3 minutes to have an actual conversation. So it’s a trade-off. Which works better?

I’ll probably stick mainly to written words. But I’m also thinking of experimenting with other short-form videos. So stay tuned!

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy Grishma’s first line!

Recently I noticed this photo and others posted on social media by author Rachel Jagoda Lithgow, documenting her visit to Budapest. They caught my eye because I recognized them as stolpersteine.

These are plaques that have been installed in Germany and other European countries to memorialize Jews murdered during the Holocaust. There are now an estimated 70,000 stones (representing perhaps 1% of those murdered). The plaques are generally placed in front of the last home where that person resided.

I know about this through personal experience.

About 20 years ago I received an email from a stranger in Germany. He explained that he had tracked me down because he had acquired a property in Hamburg he knew previously belonged to my family. He was planning to honor them with a plaque and he wanted to make sure he had their biographical details correct.

How do I describe the feeling this created in me?

On the one hand, the man seemed friendly and well-intentioned. He had gone out of his way to locate me and wanted to do things right. On the other hand, I couldn’t shake the feeling of Why aren’t you returning the property to its rightful owners?

But then I felt guilty. I thought, I don’t need a house in Germany. Maybe it was selfish or greedy to wonder if that house should be returned to me (or my cousins). If it was stolen so long ago, was it wrong of me to care about it now? Returning the property wouldn’t undo the deaths.

After the man got the info he was seeking, we had no more contact. But to this day, I’ve been left with an unsettled feeling. What would I have done in his shoes? Would I have had no compunction about acquiring that property I knew was stolen from people before they were murdered? I’d like to think not.

All of this came up when I saw Rachel’s post. But then it got worse.

As I took a closer look, I saw that her post had over a thousand reactions, and the majority of the emojis were laughter. 😆Yes, laughter. People were laughing at the image of the plaques honoring Jews.

So I wrote a comment pointing that out. And immediately my own account was deluged with laughing emojis.😆Because I wanted to support Rachel, I shared her post. Immediately those followers started popping up on my page.

Honestly, my blood ran cold.

I checked who they might be. The first profiles I saw had the appearance of bots—that is, a handful of or even no friends, no posts. In fact, that coincided with what I’d read in The New York Times: “A torrent of fake videos and images generated by [Iranian] artificial intelligence have overrun social networks during the first weeks of the war in Iran.” That made sense: Iran could have also launched a bot campaign targeting posts with Jewish content on social media.

But then I looked at more profiles. And these were clearly real individuals. They lived in the US, and their pages displayed the level of hate that is currently acceptable on social media platforms.

Typically, if one gives a reason for Substack, they state it at the beginning. But I’m putting it at the end.

In recent years, when I’ve mentioned being on the receiving end of extreme hate, or what it’s like to have death threats aimed at you, I’ve often been met with skepticism, with disbelief. People seem to think I (and others) have an overactive imagination. Or a thin skin. They definitely don’t seem to know what it feels like. So, yes, that’s my reason for writing this.

Photo by Rachel Jagoda Lithgow

When people prefer to contact you off-line about a topic, you get a sense of how sensitive that topic is. In this case, the authors told me about incidents where they felt either discriminated against or betrayed by agents at conferences because of their age.

It can be hard to come out publicly and report something like that. As soon as you speak up, you open yourself to criticism and denial: Can you prove it happened? How do you know why they did what they did? Maybe you’re imagining it. Or exaggerating it. Maybe the problem is just that you wrote a bad book. Et cetera.

One off-line response was different from the others. This person—herself an older author—took offense at my use of the term elder abuse. She felt I was insulting older authors by assuming that seeking a traditional publisher means they are letting themselves be exploited, when in fact they know exactly what they are doing. She used terms such as impaired and deluded and demented to describe how she felt I was portraying—and demeaning—her and other older authors.

Initially I was shocked. For one, I’m an older author myself, so whatever I wrote would apply to me as well. Beyond that, as a publishing professional advocating for authors, my entire motivation is to protect them, elevate them, and facilitate as much as I can their ability to publish their work.

I immediately flashed back to what is in some ways comparable: the #metoo movement. That informed my reply:

“Calling out elder abuse doesn’t make older authors deluded or demented any more than calling out rape culture makes women sluts.”

And therein lies the problem. The more I thought about it, the more similarities I saw. (And I should add, just as #metoo included those of any gender who were sexually harassed or assaulted, the elder abuse of older authors is not gender specific.)

All of this got me thinking about the #metoo experiences I had but never shared. Partly that was because it was before social media. But if I’m honest, it was also because of the stigma. So I’m going to do it now.

This happened when I was in my twenties. I was working on a research project with several other grad students. One was auditing a class by a young professor. I don’t remember what the class was because I never registered for or attended it. But I did hear that she went on a date with the professor. As I recall, they slept together, it didn’t go well, and then she refused to go out with him again.

All that was on the periphery of my awareness… until I got my transcript for the semester. All our grades at the time were pass/fail, and I had one fail. It was from the professor of the class my friend audited. He gave her a fail too.

After we compared notes and realized this was his payback from no more sex, we went to the dean. The fails were removed. What I remember most vividly, though, was the humiliation of sitting there, having to explain in detail how that fail ended up on my record, to defend against the implication that we invited this abuse. Even now I feel squeamish recounting it, like Do I really want to share this?

But I do. Because I see the connection. Abuse is abuse at any age. And it feels demeaning. If you’d asked my colleague and me to characterize ourselves, we likely would said we were “empowered women.” Yet we were still vulnerable to the power dynamics operating against us.

Obviously agents and those who run writers conferences aren’t looking for sexual favors, but they can nonetheless wield power and take advantage of writers’ vulnerabilities. As authors—regardless of our age in this moment—one step toward correcting this dynamic is to become aware of it and be willing to admit its impact.

I was shocked when someone later accused me of elder abuse, saying I should have stopped the ad. In fact, I had worked (as an editor) for national experts on elder financial abuse and was aware of the distinction between supporting the informed choice of an elder and actual elder abuse. To this day, I feel I made the right decision in supporting that client.

I mention this because I want to make it clear I don’t say speak lightly about elderly abuse. However, it came to mind after attending several writers’ conferences. I saw what I regard as publishing professionals taking advantage of older authors’ urgent felt-need to be published.

It is common knowledge the industry favors young writers, especially for works of fiction. As I have written elsewhere, agents and publishers seek authors they can mold and invest in over a long career. Still, it is common practice at conferences to stress the importance of would-be authors, regardless of age, securing an agent and making a run for it within traditional publishing.

The industry’s preference for young writers may be acknowledged, but the implication is that if your book is good enough, you can be that special exception to the rule. I don’t have stats on the odds, but my sense is older authors believe they have a 20% chance with a given agent. Whereas I suspect their chances are more like 0.2%.

Add to this the fact that conferences attract a preponderance of older writers. At ones I’ve attended, the majority appeared over fifty, possibly older. They invest in conferences because they’re serious about getting published. And they know the clock is ticking.

But how is it working out?

Consider these examples. I asked one author who was close to eighty if she had pitched her book, which she had worked on for many decades, to agents during a conference. “Oh yes!” she said, lighting up. “I pitched to several and they were very, very positive.” She described the encouragement she received, which not only made her feel valued but also suggested it would be premature to explore anything beyond the world of traditional publishing.

Another author, at a different conference, spoke about pitching to agents who were similarly encouraging. However, that author ended up feeling she had been “led on” because, while the agents were enthusiastic to her face, she later learned their intentions had not been genuine. In fact, younger authors at that conference described qualitatively different interactions and response from agents than did their older counterparts.

This is where I come to elder abuse. Because publishing professionals are knowingly misleading older authors. They are aware of what they’re doing. I’ve heard agents and publisher admit they rarely or never take on older authors who are not already celebrities.

One conference organizer bristled when I questioned his emphasis on pitching to agents, especially with older authors in a publishing environment that now offers more expanded options for publishing. My suggestions were unwelcome, he said, because their agents had all that covered.

So why is this happening?

The only reason that makes sense to me is that the systems and culture of the traditional publishing industry are deeply established, and agents and other professionals benefit from not rocking the boat. It would hurt their bottom line to admit the truth or change their practice. These professionals also know authors look up to them, trust them, and depend on them. They know an author’s intense yearning to publish creates vulnerability. Ultimately, I think, publishing professionals know they hold the power when it comes to older authors, and so they wield it.

And that’s the definition of abuse.

Image: ChatGPT generated

Strictly speaking, from the point of view of cultivating mindfulness, that makes sense. We live in a cultural moment in which we’re bombarded with stimuli. It’s easy to respond by multitasking. You might be scrolling on your phone as you chat with a friend and munch on some lunch, all the while keeping an eye on the clock so you’re not late for your next meeting. With this kind of multitasking, we end up doing so many things that it’s as though we’re not doing any of them.

However, as an instruction without context, the guidance to avoid multitasking can be confusing. Case in point. A woman asked on social media how she could stop multitasking when what she was working on required her to attend to three things happening at once, all under a tight deadline.

It was a sincere question. She was taking the guidance about multitasking to heart and seeking a way to integrate it into her life. The answers she received were along the lines of “Stop and have a cup of tea.” “Go outside and sit in nature.” “Just focus on one task at a time.” “Learn to prioritize!” “Watch your breath!”

While some of those might be helpful suggestions, they miss the point. If we could always simply do one task at a time, there would be no need to multitask. But there’s a difference between multitasking because you’re distracted and multitasking because your job is complex. I mean, what would happen if we didn’t have doctors and teachers and others doing complex jobs?

Even writing is a complex, multifaceted activity. You can’t just sit there and watch your breath and expect to write something cogent.

Think of all the things you have to do at once as a writer. If you’re writing a book, you need to think about the outline and how to develop your plot or theme. If you “stay present” in chapter 3 but forget what you wrote last week in chapter 2, your book won’t hold together. At the same time, you need to think about grammar and punctuation.

Even if you can focus for a while exclusively on writing, at some point you have to think about publishing and marketing and all of that. If I could use the excuse that I’m not thinking about marketing because that would involve multitasking, trust me, I would use it!

So where does mindfulness come in, and how can it help with the multitasking involved in writing or any other complex task?

I believe that if we practice mindfulness regularly—that is, for a brief time each day—it has the effect of slowing our mind down. When our mind slows down, it becomes sharper. Less stressed. More creative. Then it can flow more naturally between tasks, and we can accomplish much more. We may still be multitasking when necessary, but we will be better writers.

Photo credit: Vilkasss/Pixabay

At one point, I realized I was assuming the first lines of most books would be, if not the best line, at least among the best lines of that book. But the more I talked with authors about their first lines, the more I realized that wasn’t necessarily the case.

Many authors use their first line as a way to best introduce their story. As a result, when asked about their first line, they fall naturally into giving their elevator pitch for the book. Which is wonderful if one is looking for that kind of pitch.

I had, to be honest, something slightly different in mind. Even if I don’t quite know what that is. So I’m approaching this as an experiment. As I zero in on what would create the most interesting videos, I made a shift. Instead of asking authors about their first line, I decided to ask about their *best line.*

The adage “Save the best for last” came to mind. That would preclude having your first line be your best. Well… I’m not being serious. That isn’t exactly an author-centric adage. And when I started asking authors about their best lines, one said it was her first line. In general, though, focusing on best rather than first, seems have opened up the territory.

So this week I’m sharing my first in the Best Line series. Meet Lori B. Duff, author of the legal thriller Devil’s Defense…

I’ve found myself riveted to the Buddhist monks’ Walk for Peace. So much about it is compelling: their commitment, their conviction, their compassion, their courage, their persistence, their humility. They didn’t let obstacles—whether it be rain, snow, illness, injury, or hostility—stand in their way. I see a level of inner fortitude rare in our world today.

But it’s more than that. They are redefining “political” by making a political statement through spiritual means.

I know some people laud them for the opposite reason—for being free of politics or beyond the political realm. That misses the point.

Think about it. When they planned this journey, it’s not a coincidence they chose to walk from Texas to Washington DC. They didn’t decide, for example, to walk from Texas to Disney World.

And it wasn’t a mistake that they went to City Hall in Richmond, Virginia, and met Governor Spanberger, who pronounced today Walk for Peace Day.

Even Aloka, their dog, is sporting a USA eagle emblem on his bandana!

The mistake is ours if we consider the political and the spiritual to be mutually exclusive. Insisting the former is dirty and the latter is saintly just shows we haven’t yet found a way to see how they intersect. But these monks are doing it right before our eyes.

In fact, the dictionary is also ahead of most of us. According to Merriam-Webster, politics is “the total complex of relations between people living in society.”

I have to ask: If we view the “relations between people living in society” as something so negative that it must be avoided at all costs, how are we ever going to have peace in this world?

On the one hand, it seems simple to make this shift and understand that peace begins with our inner state, and that the collective effect (the “politics”) of our peace can then extend to the whole world. On the other hand, it seems people’s allergies to what they view as politics are so powerful as to preclude peace.

If we define peace purely in terms of our own inner state (where peace begins), yet won’t take the next step (the collective effort of how we treat others) because we see one as spiritual and the other as political, this world will never become peaceful.

I think about this in my own writing. The Die is both political fiction and metaphysical fiction. A group of friends in the independent nation of California are faced with a dictator who’s ruling the States. Undeniably political. Yet its message is about the spiritual mindset they must find and adopt to win freedom for themselves and the country.

It’s been a challenge to navigate the publishing world with this kind of convergence of political and metaphysical. Potential readers react as though I’m serving up oil and water; if they don’t see a way to siphon off one or the other, then they’ll take a pass on both.

In 2026, this bind has us in a stranglehold. I believe the way out is to redefine what we consider political. If we can look to the monks—and our own experience—we can see that just as we are spiritual in essence, we are also political. Our breath is political. Our heartbeat is political. Our talk and our walk are political. And all of that is a positive.

If our future depends on it, do you think we have the courage to redefine our world?

Photo credits:
Aloka the Peace Dog, Facebook Page
Richmond City Hall, photo from WTVR CBS